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Steve Hughes wrote Stiff with an audience in mind. As creator of The Good Tyme Writers Buffet—a literary series/potluck which runs out of a neighborhood art space—Hughes offers up each story in the collection like a dish to be passed. Just as each Buffet was thematically tied to a gallery show, so is each story in Stiff. The book serves as a kind of photo album of moments when artists were working separately and collaboratively in the same space. The process of eating, drinking, making, and working together (and apart) is what Hughes says is the central theme of the collection: finding home.

In Hughes’s stories, home is not just a physical structure where one arranges their stuff but the place where one most belongs. Finding that place can be a lifelong struggle. In "Ripening," a man and woman in an illicit affair witness their genitals leave their bodies for a rendezous. In "I Don’t Feel Sorry for Mrs. Miller," a paperboy becomes "friendly" with one of his customers. In "Dexter’s Song," a drug-addicted saxophone player meets a bored suburban woman who gives him her ex-boyfriend’s sax, which causes him to play better than ever. The stories in Stiff are odd and otherworldly, with themes ranging from cowboys to "burn" to "girlfriend material" to summer. And yet, at the end of the day, the characters in these stories are all just looking for a place to hang their hats and feel whole again.

Readers of contemporary fiction will enjoy this outrageous and evocative ensemble of stories.

Steve Hughes is the writer and publisher of Detroit’s longest-running zine Stupor. His collection Stupor: A Treasury of True Stories was funded by a grant from the Kresge Foundation. His stories have appeared in Fence and A Detroit Anthology.

Steve Hughes’s characters in Stiff are a handful—love-struck, addled, smart-ass, and wildly innocent. A Detroit romance, this collection of fiction is outrageous with lives run amok, taking high-risk turns, and rejuvenating themselves. Disaster is every day, often small-time, with that familiar taste—sour and sweet—then a blast of chicken fat and heat. Hughes’s stories offer up ‘a necessary apology to the world’ for daily, heartfelt damage done.

Combining magical surrealism with downright grittiness, Steve Hughes’s astounding Stiff reads as if Franz Kafka and Denis Johnson hooked up in one of the meaner sections of Detroit and spent the next year together in an abandoned pizza parlor writing short stories. Yes, it is that damn good.

– Donald Ray Pollock, author of The Devil All the Time and The Heavenly Table

Hughes' debut is fun and adventurous, an imaginative barrage of raw emotion.

– Jonathan Fullmer, ALA Booklist

A zany collection that explores alcoholism, modern Detroit, and characters who yearn for 'the tender warmth of female companionship.'

– Kirkus Reviews

Hughes’ lively collection is a whimsical exploration of the human need to find a sense of home and belonging.

– Mahjabeen Syed, The Booklist Reader

Being an artist can be surreal, and it's fitting that Hughes applies his own signature flavor of magical realism to properly portray that. I don't want to give much away beyond saying that you'll find a weird familiarity in even the most fantastic moments of these (often Detroit-set) stories.